“The Other Catholic Higher Education”

Professor Gerard V. Bradley has an interesting and thoughtful piece up today over at NRO , in which he laments the demise of numerous Catholic colleges/universities and encourages Catholics to bring the faith to secular schools (where the vast majority of Catholics are now being educated):

We need a new paradigm for delivering Catholic higher education. It is time to go where the Catholic students are. More than 80 percent of them attend non-Catholic institutions, where the Churchs mission has long been limited to pastoral care: On campus or at nearby Newman Centers students attend Mass, go to confession, and meet other Catholics. We must ratchet this menu of options up  way up  to include serious and sustained intellectual formation. The goal should be to establish, at or near every college with a substantial Catholic student population, a free-standing center devoted to intellectual formation, to the cultivation of the Catholic mind .

This is the other Catholic higher education.

While I am strongly encouraging my son to attend an authentic Catholic college (see, e.g., Thomas Aquinas College ), I wholeheartedly agree with Professor Bradley that Catholics must do much more to assist our children in the (continued) formation of their faith while attending secular colleges/universities (and even the vast majority of so-called Catholic schools). The stakes are simply too high to do otherwise.